


Thursday In The Danger Room

by Merixcil



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Angst, Barbara Gordon is Oracle, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Melancholy, No happy endings, dick grayson is a good, unhealthy coping mechanisms or just not coping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-22 03:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14299560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Another death in another alleyway. Bruce isn't ready to do this all over again.





	Thursday In The Danger Room

Afterwards, the only thing Bruce can remember is the smell of gunpowder. A fitting epitaph if ever there was one, though he can’t help but feel that only cruel irony could have conspired to close the book like this. In the moment, he finds himself back in the alleyway he’s spent his adult like trying to crawl away from, this place is as similar to it as any randomly selected street in Gotham City, that doesn’t mean that they’re the same.

The child stands at the other end of the street, eyes wide and glassy as they nurse the sprained wrist they picked up when the gun kicked back. They hadn’t been expecting it, probably hadn’t even held a firearm before. Lank black hair is plastered to generically brown skin, muscles ripcord sharp despite an insubstantial body mass. Selina could be their older sister.

Bruce’s heart is hammering in his chest, sending adrenaline that he doesn’t have use for coursing through his veins. The gunshot is still echoing around his skull, creating a bitter harmony with the one that’s been in there since he was eight.

Hands shaking, tongue unsteady in his mouth. It’s been a long time since the Batman felt anything like shock. “W-why…why did you…what?”

He doesn’t get an answer. The gun makes a dull clatter as it hits the tarmac and the child’s feet slap against the pavement as they run off into the night. Bruce could stop them, but the air around him feels thick and hard to move through.

Bruce shuffles over to the gun. He’s never held one before, not really. It’s such a small thing, like a child’s toy tucked into the palm of his hand. The weight is almost negligible, the safety off. For all he knows it’s still loaded, still deadly. By the time the GCPD have arrived he’s tucked it into a back pocket on his utility belt, to be thrown out to sea or dissolved in acid at his earliest convenience.

“This your work?” Detective Browne jerks his head towards the body like it’s nothing.

Bruce shakes his head and barges straight past him. “A man is dead from a gunshot wound. What part of that sounds like me?”

“Well, you are covered in his blood.”

Bruce blinks, looking down his front and seeing streaks of gore tearing through the symbol on his chest. He tries to recall how it got there and all he can remember is a flower blooming between razor sharp teeth. It had looked so pretty, then it had ended this chapter of his life. He wasn’t ready for it, he hadn’t seen it coming. He had assumed he had at least five years to work up to this. Even then, he had rationalised that the bullet would have been fired by law enforcement.

Detective Browne watches him warily, finger twitching over he taser at his hip. He wants to bring the Batman in over this so badly.

Bruce walks away. Last time he had to be dragged away from the scene, he’s grown since then.

“What are we supposed to do with him?” Detective Browne calls after Bruce.

Bruce shrugs. “It’s a dead body. Call homicide.”

The officers at Detective Browne’s back are a living hive of disbelief, muttering as they approach the body, trying to prove that it’s not real.

It’s all a show. Bruce could laugh but the sound gets stuck in his throat. He turns back for one last look at the clean cut lines of the familiar purple pinstripe, the mess of green hair marred by an ugly, bloody hole where the brains used to be. Clutched in a bony white hand is a bouquet of lilies that look real at this distance, what could have been the final punchline if the child had waited just a minute longer.

It’s all one great big fucking joke.

Bruce turns his eyes to the nearest rooftop and leaves. Strange as it may seem, there are criminals in Gotham that he still needs to get to before the night is through. Even now that The Joker is dead.

 

 

 

Dick stares Bruce down across the dining table, dumbfounded. “What you do mean he’s dead?”

Jason is still laughing. Tim’s fingers rap against the woodwork like this is a problem he can break open if only he thinks about it hard enough.

Damian’s mouth quirks into a wry smile. “Excellent. Now we can move on to more important matters.”

“A man has died, Damian.” Bruce chastises.

“No, father. A great evil has been vanquished from this city.”

“Right.” Tim agrees, absent mindedly.

Jason laughs. And he laughs and he laughs and he laughs.

Only Dick seems to be appropriately shocked, his eyes prickling with something that could never be sorrow but might just be nostalgia for a time when The Joker was just another lawbreaker in a city full of them.

“Wait.” Tim’s hand stills and he sits up, suddenly very much in the room, frowning at Jason like he’s only just noticed he’s there. “Who killed him?”

“A child. A street kid.” Bruce grunts. “I didn’t catch them.”

“You didn’t-“ Tim starts, only to be cut off by a howl of joy from Jason.

“You didn’t catch them?” Jason gasps, rising to his feet and ducking round the table to wrap his arms around Bruce. His breath catches, his whole body is shaking. “Good for you, Bruce. Fucking hell. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Bruce pushes him away. “It was a mistake.”

“So you’re gonna go after them?” Dick prompts.

“I-“ Bruce starts. He can’t finish, he doesn’t know what he’s going to do.

No one notices his treacherous tongue, hidden as it is beneath Jason’s renewed laughter, growing more hysterical by the minute.

Dick spares his brother a pitying look. His mouth opens like he might be about to say something, then closes before he can find the words.

“You…you guys know what we need to do?” Jason leans across the table. “We should go out. Get really fucked up.”

“Jason.” Dick sighs.

Damian hops down from his seat. “My age aside, the prospect of an alcohol fuelled celebration does nothing for me. If you don’t mind, I will return to my studies in advance of tonight’s patrol.”

“Go.” Bruce nods him out of the room, trying to work out how anyone can take this on the chin.

Tim doesn’t smile and his shoulders don’t relax, but he nods along with Jason like this is a thoroughly rational solution to their emotional turmoil. “I’m in.”

“Great! We’ll pick up Babs and-“

“Leave her alone.” Bruce and Dick say as one.

Jason drops his smile for a split second. “Yeah. Right. Of course.” He and Tim are out the door momentarily and Bruce makes a mental note to let Alfred know that the two of them likely won’t be back till the following morning.

Between Bruce and Dick, the dining room feels uncomfortably intimate. Bruce clears his throat to put some noise back into the space and desperately wishes someone would disturb them, if only  to break the tension.

Dick leans forward, setting his elbows on the table and folding his hands underneath his chin. A perfect mirror of Bruce at the end of so many family meals. Alfred would scold the both of them – joints on the table are meant for carving. The Joker would have found that rather funny.

“Are you ok?”

If the room weren’t so quiet, Bruce might have been able to pretend he hadn’t heard him. He attempts a smile and sees it fail in his son’s eyes. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Dick takes a long, unsteady breath that reminds Bruce of the first time he tried to walk away from the Manor for good. “Because…you know.”

“No. I don’t.”

“The Joker is dead.”

“I am aware.”

“And that doesn’t…upset you? At all?”

“Why would it?” Bruce tries to laugh Dick off and has to stop before he starts to sound like Jason.

A hand slips out from under Dick’s chin to run across his face. “God. It’s like pulling teeth.”

“It you have something you want to say-“

“Look.” Dick snaps. “I don’t have the same kind of baggage with The Joker as the others. Two Face was my sob story and I’ve long since come to terms with that. So if you need…if you need to take to anyone…about this…you can talk to me. I love him to pieces but Alfred has never had much of a charitable view on Gotham criminals.

“I’m fine.” Bruce assures him, then switched the subject. “Do you know if Barbara knows yet?”

The bitter frustration with the world that Dick has mostly been keeping in check since he was ten surfaces for a heartbeat before vanishing into the depths once again. “Of course you are. Yes, she knows. Browne told Montoya who told Bullock who told Gordon who told her.”

Bruce nods. “We should give her a few days.”

“Yeah.” Dick agrees. “Not too long though, she’s almost as bad at talking about her feelings as you.”

 

 

 

The Joker’s body sits in the GCPD first precinct morgue for almost a month before anyone looks at it and by then it’s almost impossible to get anything useful from it. Homicide don’t care, Arkham are uninterested in his remains and word on the street is that even Batman isn’t looking into his death.

Why would the Batman investigate the death of The Joker? They hated each other, and there’s plenty of other crime in Gotham to be seen to.

No official memorial service for The Joker is held. A final appeal for people to step forward with information about possible family members is put out and when no one comes forward the body is taken to the country crematorium, burned down to ash and tucked away at the back of the GCPD’s best evidence locker.

“Just in case.” Gordon explains. He’s not even in charge anymore but Bruce knows he pulled strings to be sure that no one threw away the last pieces of what might have been justice if the clown had ever had a proper day in court.

The trouble with Gotham is that it builds its own myths, many so perfectly contained that the rest of the country treat it like a laughing stock. Plenty of people think that The Joker ought to be given a decent send off, be it drunken revelry, mock funerals, or things more sinister.

Bruce watches over the beginning strains of a parade in the clown’s honour, where people who were almost his victims line up to take their place amongst the rank and file. Anger burns hot in his chest, he wants to shake them by the shoulders till they see reason, he wants to hit them till they regain their sensibility. The Batman knew The Joker better than any of them and he’s not mourning.

Without direction or just cause, parades turn into mobs which turn into riots. Bruce feels ill placed to handle the frothing crowds that seethe and try to turn in on themselves. He can separate small crowds but a city block’s worth of people is too much, even for him.

He needs to learn. People have already died.

GCPD officers try to corral the crowds, confused when Batman begrudgingly joins their ranks. Detective Browne shoots him increasingly perplexed looks, waiting for what he assumes is an inevitable change in tune.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Montoya urges. “The rest of the city needs your help.”

“No it doesn’t.” Bruce insists. Ra’s al Ghul is the other side of the world, Bane is long gone and The Joker is dead. The rest of the family can handle anything else for now.

Montoya frowns, lets her hand fall from where she was thinking about putting it on his shoulder. “Ok.”

Gotham starts to drown in forest fires that the emergency services are ill equipped to deal with. Nothing is big enough to warrant the Batman’s attention individually but the rising tide of small scale acts of violence is enough to keep him on the ground constantly. When he’s not out and about in his night time uniform, he takes to the public stage as Bruce Wayne, trying to pull the city together from another angle.

People don’t want to come together, there want to cheer for the death and the life of a man who brought them nothing but misery and bad jokes. Stories weave their way through the city, till people start to say that The Joker was killed by a can of silly string to the heart. It’s going to take years to get everyone on the side of the truth.

It doesn’t seem right to Bruce that the colour and the madness should continue without the clown in their midst. There’s another clown still kicking around though, and she’s going to be trouble.

Bruce wakes with a start in the afternoon, hoping to find that he dreamed the past two months and that he’ll see The Joker on the evening news, alive and well. Alfred comes through with a cup of coffee and throws the curtains open. “I believe you have a busy night ahead of you, sir.”

Every Gotham news channel leads with the same untidy makeup and split lip indicative of Harley Quinn’s last mugshot. Bruce waits to feel excited by the possibility of recapturing her but is instead met by a twisting, ugly sympathy that he wishes he could throw out into the streets.

He takes his time. Dick wanders in and out of the batcave, asking if he hadn’t better get a move on. The others are already on patrol, Damian effectively signed off school till things have calmed down while Jason and Tim set themselves up in a midtown basement.

Dick should have gone back to Blüdhaven weeks ago, but he keeps hovering at the edge of Bruce’s vision with cups of tea and expectant eyes.

“Harley Quinn’s no threat.” Bruce tells him.

Bruce finds her in the graveyard of Saint Michael’s, an aging catholic church to the east of Downtown. The church is old and dark and looks like is seconds from crumbling in to dust. She’s instantly recognisable by the orange of her jumpsuit and the slack of her shoulders. Her hair is unstyled and ratty out of the shelter of her jester’s cap and it’s possible to hear her sobbing from a block away – great long wails that sound out of place next to the uniform shrieks of the emergency services dashing from one end of the city to the next.

In his grand master plan, Bruce has already decided that he will pin her by force, tie her up and leave her to the police. But he flubs the landing, approaching slowly and not particularly quietly. Harley glances over her shoulder to watch him, eyes ringed red and mouth stretched wide in a horrible grimace.

Bruce remembers a flower blooming from between someone's teeth. It had been beautiful, if only for a moment. He stops a short way away from her.

Harley shakes her head. “Please. Just lemme have this. I’ll come quietly, I just…”

She’s sat in front of a cross made of plywood and held together with string, the words _RIP Mr J_ scrawled across it in sharpie.

“I just…I mean…” Harley gulps air at an alarming pace before bursting into a new round of sobs. “N-no one was gonna g-give him a proper funeral. And I dunno if they’ve even…if they’ve ever buried him yet so I thought I should c-c-come out here and do somethin’ for him, ya know? He thought it w-was creepy.”

“You shouldn’t be here.” Bruce scolds.

Harley wipes her eyes. “That’s what Ivy said. It’s stupid, right? I haven’t been in love with him for years. It’s not like anyone else cares, ‘cept maybe you, Mr B. Kinda feels like you have to care enough for everyone, don’t it?”

“No.” Bruce replies. “I’m taking you back to Arkham.”

He gives her ten minutes before he bundles her into the passenger seat of the batmobile. Harley cries into her uncuffed hands the whole way back to the asylum.

 

 

 

When the dust starts to, people are anxious to know what new horror will fill the void left by The Joker. A few people try, ludicrous masks that barely last the week struggling to stir up fear amongst people who have lived the same scenario a thousand times over.

Oracle tracks the growing number of would be supervillains with military precision, firing off assignments to the Birds of Prey and calling on Batman only when they need the extra firepower.

“Where is everyone?” She asks, having tapped into the batcave radio wavelength and found Bruce the only one home.

“Robin is still on day patrol. Red Robin and Red Hood are operating out of the East End, focusing on mob activity. Orphan never left Blüdhaven and Spoiler’s had to leave town with her family to keep her cover. Nightwing’s gone home.”

“That can’t leave much for you to do.”

“With the Birds of Prey so active, it really doesn’t.” Bruce concedes. “What can I do for you?”

Oracle wants him to help Huntress disarm a new masked villain calling themselves Destructor, operating in south Bristol Country. It takes Bruce five minutes with Google to work out their secret identity, though they are carrying some rather powerful explosives.”

“And it’s Huntress.” Oracle reminds him. “You know how she gets.”

Murder-ey, is the word Tim would use to describe Huntress. Fantastic fighters sometimes need someone at their side to remind them where their moral core is supposed to be.

“It would be good to see you outside of work.” Bruce tells Oracle as he fires up the batmobile engine. “I’m sure there are things you need to get off your chest.”

The voice modulator cuts out to make way for Oracle’s answering laughter, as bright and clear as if Bruce were standing right next to her. “Please, I’ve got nothing left to work through. If you’ve got something you need to say though, I’m all ears.”

“Ha.” Bruce reaches for the controls on his satnav and starts pinpointing Huntress’s location.

 

 

 

“Sir, I can’t help but notice that you’ve spent a lot of time out of uniform recently.” Alfred barges into Bruce’s bedroom with a sly smile.

Bruce groans and rolls over in an attempt to run from the light when Alfred twitches the curtains open. “If you want something from me, it has to wait till after coffee.”

Alfred sets a pot of coffee down on the bedside table, the thick, earthy smell intoxicating and sharp. Bruce eyes it suspiciously. “What do you want?”

“I thought it might be a good time to have a chat about your future, Master Bruce.” Alfred pours them each a cup of coffee and settles himself on the foot of the bed. “You’re getting on in years, after all.”

“I’m forty two!”

“And you’ve recently been through a major life change. It’s an excellent time to take stock, perhaps to reconsider how long you intend to maintain your standing in the local community.”

“What major life change?”

Alfred pauses, eyes falling somewhere short of Bruce’s. “You have recently lost a competitor, which has left you at the top of the food chain in your sector, so to speak. Now, I cannot deny that there will be times when you will be of use to the ongoing cause but it seems to me that the younger generation are handling things rather well unassisted.”

Light streams through windows that haven’t been replaced in more than thirty years. Outside, the afternoon rumbles on to the tune of birdsong and traffic echoing up from the city. The cavernous halls of the Manor are silent save for the steady creak of timber that will never quite settle.

“Nothing’s changed.” Bruce sits up, reaching for his coffee.

Alfred’s lips thin, the breath he draws through his nose about as calm as that of a bull preparing to charge. “There’s really no need for that.”

“For what?”

“For the ridiculous sacrificial stoic act. You don’t have to pretend there’s anything as bad as The Joker left out there.”

Bruce winces and bites his tongue. The immediate desire to lash out fades fast, tempered by years of putting his foot in his mouth only to disappoint Alfred.

There’s not much day left and the night that follows will be long. There are things to do, promises to keep. Bruce Shakes himself free of the duvet and drains his coffee in two gulps. “Take the rest of the day off, Alfred.”

“Master Bruce-“

“I mean it.”

“But, sir!”

Bruce starts dressing before Alfred can offer to assist. He’s patient, moving slowly till the bedroom door swings open and closed behind him.

 

 

 

The cave is as dark and unpleasant as it ever was, though Bruce no longer notices the stench of bat faeces. The computer bank casts him in a thin blue light that he gravitates towards like a moth to a flame. Half the screens show the files he has open for an ongoing case, the other has local news feeds, commenting on the clean-up efforts following the riots.

No one mentions The Joker, refusing to look the cause of the mess in the eye. What matters to them is the aftermath, the pieces of broken buildings cleared off the streets so that someone can step in to rebuild.

Newscasters talk about city council plans to handle the redevelopments, as if every other time Gotham fell to ruin the streets weren’t snapped up by someone with cash to burn who renovated them privately. Bruce would know, he’s usually the person that buys up the derelict properties. He’s just nice enough to give them back to the people once he’s done with it, mostly.

A camera pans over an alley piled high with old tires, just begging for someone to sweep in and set them alight. Bruce thinks he might recognise the street but the picture changes so quickly that he can’t be sure. Frowning, he pulls up a map of the city and tries to retrace routes he’s covered hundreds of times before to get a clearer idea of what he thinks he remembers. His eyes slip from Crime Alley, up across Amusement Mile then plunge down towards Midtown. Nothing looks familiar, at least, not in the way he wants it to. With greater urgency he zooms in, opening up street view to check individual roads, looking for somewhere he can name the final resting place of the old world order.

The pictures are mostly a few weeks old, ringed in the first flames from the riots, people blurred as they move on as fast as they can. Has this really been happening for so long?

The dashboard pings to alert him of someone arriving in the cave and Bruce remembers that he promised Spoiler he’d listen to the intel she’s been gathering on League operatives in the city since The Joker dropped down dead. He’ll probably wind up palming the case off on Tim and Jason.

Bruce exits the maps on the screen quickly, and closes down his old photo file for The Joker that had been open behind the browser. Tucked between Joesephus Quigona and Joe Chill in his archives, and twice as large as both files combined.

Scrolling quickly, Bruce pulls up his Riddler file as a distraction. He should have deleted the Joe Chill file years ago.

 

 

 

Matches Malone patrols the streets of Gotham in daylight hours, trying to reconnect with his mob link ups after ducking out of town to avoid the worst of the riots. He slides right back into his home town, gathering information from hookers and petty thieves who know him well enough to like him without trusting him.

“You know what happened to the clown?” He asks a kid no older than fifteen, already defending his street corner like his life depends on it.

The kid shrugs. “He got shot. I dunno, man. That was ages ago.”

“Wasn’t that long ago.”

“It’s been like six months.” The kid keeps his eyes on his surroundings, scanning the environment for customers and police cars.

Matches pulls his coat tight and moves on. Six months is nothing. What difference can six months make? 

 

 

 

When something finally warrants his attention, Batman is ready for it. The months spent keeping busy enough to maintain his strength without running himself ragged have left him better prepared than he would have anticipated to re-enter the fray. Lacking his usual litany of sprains and bruises, he moves fast over rooftops, bounding from building to building without having to pace himself as he trails a pair of cars snailing through the Diamond District just as the warning letter had promised.

“Coming up on the Second Bank of Gotham on twenty second street.” Nightwing says into his ear.

Batman nods. “Good. He’s still on the move, I’ll keep you updated. Robin?”

“Still in position.” Robin replies. He’s staking out the Bank of America branch on Second Avenue, the second bank ever built in Gotham. “I believe Signal is still on the move.”

“Almost there!” Signal cuts in, out of breath. He’s got two hundred and twentieth street where a Citigroup and another branch of the Bank of Gotham are sat side by side.

“Roger that.” Batman drops to street level and dips into the shadow between two buildings to keep a better eye on the cars as they leave the main drag. “No one moves on the target till his destination is confirmed. Two Face may use decoys. I repeat, don’t try to jump him. If anyone has forgotten to wear bullet proofing beneath their uniform, please declare yourself now.”

The answering silence is reassuring. It lasts till Signal announces that he’s reached his destination.

It takes Two Face three hours to pick a target, moving from one end of the city to the other at a snail’s pace. Batman would be worried if they weren’t still an hour off two in the morning.

Two minutes to two. It’s Robin’s spot that gets the sting, setting the rest of them converging on his location as fast as they can. They’re good together, positively wonderful. Batman had forgotten how easy it is to anticipate the movements of his compatriots as they mow down the hired help before they reach Two Face himself. Nightwing moves like a living shadow, hard to pin down as he twists himself into impossible shapes. Robin is faster, less refined but ruthless when he goes for the jugular.

Signal has a long way to go to get back to them. Batman feels somewhat foolish for sending him so far out of the way.

The last goon goes down just past the front doors, a pretty poor showing by Harvey’s usual standards. The man himself stands at the other end of the atrium, waiting for them.

Nightwing flinches, Robin growls under his breath. Batman rushes forward, vaguely aware that the twin pistols in Two Face’s hands could do some real damage if they hit their mark but he’s struggling to remember that any of this is real, that it could really hurt him. This place is luxurious, rich, safe. It’s nothing like the seedy little alleys that litter the city north of here.

The burned half of Harvey’s face twists into a delighted grimace while the other side stays stony and cold. Batman leaps high to get out of the sightline of the final bullet and knocks his prey to the ground.

The face below him in unfamiliar and unfriendly. Batman gets his fingers into Two Face’s hair and brings his skull home to rest on the clean marble floors. Once, twice, and he’s out cold. A thin trickle of blood mars the black and white eddies that mark the stone. It feels final, satisfying. He lets himself breathe.

Worried chatter is starting to fill up the feed in his ear. “What’s going on?” Signal asks, out of breath again. He can’t be half way here yet.

“A certain someone is being an idiot.” Nightwing’s voice sounds strange, echoing through the hall while lighting up their earpieces. “Batman, are you ok?”

“I’m fine.” Batman replies.

Robin kisses his teeth. “See? I told you, Nightwing. That was spectacularly stupid, though.”

Batman rises to his feet and rounds on both of them. He still has a few inches on Nightwing, enough to intimidate. “Now is not the time to question my methods.”

Nightwing doesn’t flinch. “Running into gunfire is always dangerous, if you want to get in a huff about it, be my guest.” His eyes flicker towards the unconscious Two Face and grow wide. “Oh my God…”

“He’s fine.” Robin snaps, two fingers on Two Face’s pulsepoint.

“Define ‘fine’.”

“He’ll live.”

Sirens are whirring just outside the building, Oracle must have called them in. “We should go.” Batman says, then takes off without waiting for the others to join him. It’s not like Two Face needs to be tied up for the sake of the emergency services.

“I’ll catch you up.” Signal says. To his credit, he doesn’t sound remotely exasperated.

Rushing through the city after dark, trying to stay ahead of the police even as he makes regular checks to be sure they know what they’re doing, Batman looks up and sees a skyline covered by cranes he could have sworn sprung up in the past hour. Nightwing catches him up five minutes later, radiating annoyance but professional enough to save it for later.

“Where did they come from?” Bruce asks.

“What, the cranes?” Dick cocks an eyebrow. “They’ve been there for months. They were brought in to clean up after the riots.”

It doesn’t feel like enough changed in the riots to warrant that much construction. Bruce shakes his head. “I don’t like it.”

“Yeah. I figured you wouldn’t.” Dick mutters. He hooks a hand underneath Bruce’s elbow and pulls him onwards. Away from Two Face, away from the cranes. Back towards the unchanging comforts of Wayne Manor.

 

 

 

Bruce’s dreams are filled with lush red roses growing from a thick tangle of green briers and white thorns. The birds are perfectly silent in this garden without wind or water. Somewhere, a woman is crying but he’s not going to run to her aid.

The ground is paved with mottled marble, a trail of blood running right down the middle like a spool of gold thread to mark his path. Bruce follows it till the cries have turned to laughter.

A gunshot sounds in the distance, its echoes growing louder till they feel powerful enough to rip him in two. He looks down and finds the front of his suit splattered with blood but it doesn’t worry him because he knows its not his. The roses laugh around their clean white teeth, the flowers bursting open and showering him with petals. The stone beneath his feet is turning grey with city smog and he is just a child in an alleyway watching his world fall apart.

 

 

 

Two Face is fine.

Or: Two Face will never be fine again but he lives. A shockingly large number of peoples think this is some fault of Bruce’s

Jason shrugs. “What do I care?”

“I dunno, it just doesn’t seem like a very Batman thing to do.” Tim doesn’t look up from the bike he’s working on. They’re bundled into his and Jason’s hideout, working around a messy workshop with oppressively low ceilings.

Dick stares the three of them down, bristling with moral outrage. “So, none of you think that it’s a problem that the man marketing himself as Gotham’s defender left a man brain damaged?”

“It wasn’t my intention to hurt him that badly. But he was a repeat offender, he knew what he was doing.” Bruce keeps his voice neutral. He moves over to Tim and tries to get an idea of the upgrades he’s working on from the state of the bike’s master board.

“Great. Incredible.” Dick spits. “So now I get to watch you angst over this as well.”

“I’m not going to _angst_.” Bruce retorts. “And what do you mean ‘as well’?”

“So we’re just gonna pretend that you don’t have Joker issues that you refuse to work through. Ok.”

“Joker issues?” Jason snorts. “Why the fuck would he have Joker issues? They fucking hated each other.”

“Dick shoots Jason a withering look. “Hate is a complicated emotion.”

“Not really.” Tim hums.

“I was perhaps a little shaken by the manner of his death but it’s been months. Really, Dick. I’m fine.”

Dick’s eyes narrow. “Months? Exactly how long do you think it’s been since the clown was killed?”

“Seven, eight months?”

“Ha!” Jason barks. “Wow, maybe you do have Joker issues. It’s been over a year, B-man.”

Time can’t work like that. Bruce starts to count back the days, the weeks he’s lived through since he stood in that alleyway and finds the seams he has stitched between now and then winding all the tighter, till he can turn time into something small enough to fit in his pocket.

“Yeah, you’re fine.” Dick deadpans. “Listen, if you want to head this whole ‘Batman commits act of serious violence;’ thing off at the pass, Bruce Wayne has some serious damage control to do with the press.

“Who cares what the papers think?” Jason asks.

“It’s advantageous to have public opinion on my side.” Brue admits. “I think it would be better to let the worst of this blow over, though. So it doesn’t look too much like I’m defending a public menace.”

“You know, the easiest way to do that would have been not to punch Two Face’s lights out.” Dick retorts.

Jason and Tim’s eyebrows raise in tandem. There was a time, not that long ago, when Bruce wouldn’t have let anyone talk to him like that.”

“I find it very hard to believe that anyone cares that much about Two Face’s wellbeing. Last week the Gazette was arguing that we should bring back the death penalty to deal with the worst Gotham offenders and now they’re upset that you’ve permanently put one out of action? Doesn’t make sense?” Tim shakes his head.

Bruce frowns. “Jason has been a terrible influence on you.”

“Ain’t that the truth?” Jason grins.

“And look how people reacted to The Joker’s death! They were so happy about it. But now they want to pretend they feel differently about Two Face.”

“When The Joker died, this city descended into a three month long riot that turned Downtown into a wasteland and scared the tourists away for the next decade.” Dick cuts in. “Wow, it’s almost like no one in Gotham is capable of an emotionally mature response to any of this. I guess the joke really was on us after all.”

“Don’t say that!” Jason growls.

“And as for you.” Dick turns to Bruce. “I would have thought you might show a little more remorse for Harvey Dent. He was your friend, after all.”

“That was years ago.”

“So what? Actually, who cares if he was your friend? If you keep in coming at people like that, you’ll wind up killing someone.”

“Drop it, Dick.” Bruce tells him. He hadn’t realised that he’d hit too hard till he was back in the save and the damage was long done.

He could have hit The Joker that hard and the clown would have sprung back up. Like putty, malleable and ever changing. Something to trust in, something that would never stop coming back.

 

 

 

Jim Gordon is old. He’s been old for years but Bruce never cared to look before now. With him no longer at the forefront of the GCPD and with Batman spending less and less time on the job though, it’s easy to see the changes. Strawberry blonde hair has faded to grey, the lenses of his glasses growing thicker by the year.

“How’s that kid, Browne?” Jim asks, trussed up in at least three jumpers, stood on the stoop of the old brownstone he used to share with his wife.

“Fine. Hasn’t tried to hit me recently.”

“I should hope not, not after what you did to Two Face.” Jim chuckles. “Honestly, Batman. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“I’m not proud of myself for that.”  Batman tells him. Which is true, but he’s a long way off feeling at all sorry about them either.

“Hey, don’t sweat it. There are cops in this city who do worse on the daily. Truth be told I’m just glad you haven't wound up down at Arkham without The Joker to keep you grounded.”

Out here towards the summit of Gotham the city traffic sounds far off and there are a handful of stars still visible through gaps in the clouds. A little pocket of calm. In a few years this will all be gone, and the outskirts will start to creep across the river. 

One day Wayne Manor will be within the city limits. Where will the alleyway be then?

“You called me here for something.” Bruce prompts Jim.

Jim puffs out a perfect smoke ring. “Talk to my daughter, would you? She’s been quiet recently. I’m worried.

“I’m sure she’s fine.” Bruce assures him. He no longer knows if he’s lying.

 

 

 

The clock tower is thick with dust, the deluge of out of commission computers now pouring out of the belfry and down the stairs. Bruce arrives as Matches Malone on his way home from a raucous night at an Old Town bar, his collar popped against the wind coming in off the Atlantic. He shoves the out of date tech aside; Oracle forgets that most people don’t trust the lift in her building.

“I wasn’t expecting you.” Oracle says, very fast, before barking off a series of orders to an operative; in Iran, if the maps on screen are anything to go by.

“Liar. You haven’t been in contact for over a week. You knew I was coming.”

“Please, you know I can take care of myself. Did my dad send you?”

“You should talk to him.”

“I should.” She concedes, her shoulders sagging ever so slightly as Bruce comes up behind her. The screens are crowded with a jumble of information that he can’t quite parse into a cohesive whole.

“What’s all this?”

“Just keeping an eye on things.” Oracle shrugs. “Gotta stay on top of it all. It’s easier now I’ve got Red Hood and Red Robin on call.”

A wave of guilt washes the bottom out of Bruce’s stomach. “I’m sorry I haven’t been more help these past…years.”

“Please, Batman. It’s got nothing to do with you. I make my own problems, you know that. Paranoid as sin and I don’t like anyone who’s not my old man calling the shots at the GCPD.”

Sometimes Bruce forgets that the two of them aren’t related. Oracle carries a ruthless streak of certainty that he can’t replicate but otherwise they’re perfectly matched.

He nods. “Of course. Well, I just wanted to stop by…to ask…you know...your dad said I should ask…I thought…or he thought…we thought. Maybe-“

“Spit it out!” Oracle’s fingers click ever faster over her keyboards and Bruce realises that she hasn’t stopped since he walked in the room.

She hasn’t even looked at him.

“I just want to be sure that you’re not feeling…anything. About The Joker. I mean, I’m sure you know what you’re doing, but I have to ask.”

“My dad wants to know if I’m still hung up about _The Joker_?” Oracle raises a questioning eyebrow. “Right. You know, everyone expected me to be really cut up over his death like I’d been nursing some weird revenge fantasy for the past ten years. I’m fine, I was always fine about it. Just one less thing to worry about.”

“When you say everyone…”

“Well, you a bit. Red Hood a lot. Signal had some issues he needed to project on to someone else.” Oracle shrugs. “Doesn’t take a genius level intellect to spot the pattern.”

If there’s a pattern there, Bruce doesn’t care to examine it too closely. “I can’t…I don’t…”

Oracle’s eyes flick up to his, twisting her lips into a smile. “I remember you being a pretty erudite speaker. Maybe I’m not the one who needs to get out more.”

“Maybe.” Bruce returns the smile. “I’m trying. I want to. But everyone else is doing so much. And this thing with Two Face…”

“It’s fine.” Oracle turns back to her work. “I get it. He was awful and you hated him and if you had any wiggle room in your code of honour you would have killed him years ago. But he wound up being important to you and now he’s gone and you don’t know what to do with that, because it’s not like there’s anyone you can palm these emotions off on. So you’re waiting to feel the way he made you feel again because he was the fire under your seat for so long and you’re not really sure if you can do what you do without him.”

“You're not talking about Two Face.”

Oracle blinks, pushes aside her glasses to rub at her eyes. “Chances are no one’s gonna wind you up the way he did ever again. So if you could make up your mind about whether or not to push on regardless that would be great.”

“I am pushing on.” Bruce protests.

Oracle is silent for a minute, the space Bruce occupies out of the corner of her eye growing less significant by the second till she decides he’s not as important as the red dots moving over her maps and she starts running off more orders, using codenames that he doesn’t recognise but that she doesn’t care to keep from him.

He leaves down the back staircase, stepping around old monitors and the mess of motherboards that have been thrown out where Barbara Gordon need not concern herself with it any more. “I’ll talk to your dad.” He calls back to her as he goes.

She doesn’t reply. Outside, the wind rips through his clothes all over again and Matches Malone doesn’t own a coat thick enough to really keep it out. He sleeps into a local speakeasy where no one knows his name, listening for the whispers of something dark rising on the horizon. He’s lived all his life at the centre of a storm though, and can no longer tell the lightning from the clouds.

 

 

 

The cranes stay up and Gotham keeps building, higher and higher. It’s all unfamiliar to Bruce, though to be fair, this city was never exactly permanent. Landlords don’t lease apartments, they lease the space the apartment occupies. If anything should happen to the property occupying that space, it’s the tenants’ own fault.

The smog is still thick in the air, sticking to the inside of Bruce’s lungs. One day a coroner is going to cut him open and find that he has calcified with pollution.

Wayne Manor was undamaged in the riots and so it lives on to grow progressively shorter compared to the skyscrapers it looks down on. The gargoyles on Wayne Tower have started to wear under the constant ministrations of acid rain, soon enough there will be nothing left to stand on. Bruce’s successor will have to find an excuse to renovate them without raising suspicion. Damian, with his blunt sense of humour and lack of media friendliness – it’s going to be quite the challenge.

It’s almost funny. Bruce could laugh. He hasn’t laughed in years.

Bruce wakes some mornings, convinced he’s still standing in an alleyway, covered in someone else’s blood. He waits for solid ground to resettle underneath him so he can proceed to the next chapter of his life but the pressure of the back cover bears down on him and he has nowhere else to go. The race is run, the finish line long behind him and all he has to show for it is a niche in the habitat of this city that he can’t bring himself to fill.

Red flashes overhead, rising from the GCPD building. They still have the Bat Signal but it rarely gets used anymore. They call on Red Hood and Red Robin without knowing that Oracle plans their stings almost entirely single handedly. He could help them, if the mood took him, but he’s sure he’d only be interfering.

 

 

 

Sometime after his fourteenth birthday, Damian starts to grow. By the time he’s sixteen he’s as thick set as Bruce, though nowhere near as tall, and his voice is booming bass that’s almost impossible to cover on stealth missions. He’s less malicious than Talia and less benevolent that Bruce and more sure of himself than either of them. He thinks in specifics rather than overarching moral codes and he plans for every eventuality like the future is a puzzle he can solve.

He talks about Batman as a mantle he will one day hold and sketches out ideas for the uniform he will wear once he inherits it. “Let’s face it, father. You’re not going to do this forever.”

“Quite right.” Alfred agrees. His back has developed a pronounced stoop in the past year, he’s running out of time.

Or at least, Bruce thinks it’s been a year. Time doesn’t make sense to him anymore. He caught Stephanie and Tim discussing the riots over breakfast two days ago and they seemed to think that had been four years ago. How could it have been four full years when he’s still reeling from the gun shot?

Dick has gained his first wrinkle as he slides into his middle ages and Bruce has a shoulder that doesn’t want to heal properly. No one is ever home and the Manor is so very empty.

Bruce zones out listening to Damian rattle off combat strategy in the cave, plotting a path through streets he can’t quite remember anymore. Bruce is almost certain that when the cranes came, they picked up the whole city and rearranged it while he wasn't looking.

“Are you coming, father?” Damian asks as he slips into his suit.

Bruce opens his mouth and almost tells him to take it. Take it all. The name, the house, the myriad gadgets designed by a man who can no longer give them purpose. But without those things Bruce is nothing, no identity to speak of.

Lines of red cutting through mottled marble. Bruce shakes his head. “I shouldn’t.”

“Please.” Damian reaches out to take his hand. He looks preposterous, almost fully grown and still decked out in the oversized gloves and shorts of a boy.

Next to him, Bruce looks less ridiculous than he feels. They fire up the batmobile and head out into the night. The bright lights of Gotham are like old friends in photographs that are starting to fade.

“Who are you after tonight?” Bruce asks.

“No one.” Damian replies. “Just going out on patrol. I thought you would appreciate the change of pace.”

Two Face is never getting out of that hospital bed. Harvey dent is never getting out of Two Face. The Batman is never getting out of Gotham.

“I would.” Bruce agrees. He says it with such conviction, it might almost be true.

 

 

 

Down in the dark, all alone, Bruce skims through his file database. He has terabytes of data on new villains, pulling images from citywide CCTV and the DA’s office in equal measure. He trawls through them at the behest of Barbara, Dick, Jason, Tim, Damian, Stephanie, Cass, Duke and passes them the information they need.

Most of the old data has been archived. He keeps his file on Poison Ivy because while no one’s heard from her in two years she always was the type to lie low for extended periods. Penguin’s barely active these days but barely active isn’t nothing so he gets to stay. Bruce knows for a fact that Waylon Jones skipped town five years ago but no one else believes him so he keeps the Killer Croc file to keep them satisfied. In a moment of compassion, he deleted everything he ever had on Harleen Quinzel and while the clown hasn’t made an appearance in years there are rumours of something dark bubbling up through the Gotham underground that make him worry he may have done the wrong thing.

The mouse flickers over his file on The Joker, large enough to slow the system ever so slightly, not that anyone but he and Tim are ever going to notice. He could delete the whole thing in a matter of minutes. It would be so easy. But Bruce is so sure that if he did, the clown would rise from the ground all over again. Fully formed and ready to spread chaos. To wipe away the evidence would be madness.

Bruce moves on to other things and doesn’t bother feeling bad about it. He’s hacked her mainframe - he knows Oracle feels the same way.

 

 

 

Time passes. And it passes and it passes and it passes. Alfred decides that he can’t do this anymore and so the Manor starts to play host to a seemingly endless stream of cleaners and handymen, hand picked by Barbara for safety’s sake, picking up the slack the old man left behind. The seasons start to spiral out of control, slipping through Bruce’s fingers like sand through an hourglass.

He wakes most mornings with the smell of gunpowder hot on the back of this tongue, just as he has done since he was eight. Roses bloom in the garden, the sharp teeth of their spines keeping the birds at bay.

Bruce moves through the city, past walls blacked out in graffiti he doesn’t recognise and signs pointing to parts of town he can’t put a face to. He only knows a handful of the inmates up at Arkham and most of those are from the old days. The facility doesn’t specialise in the criminally insane anymore, so what use is it?

What an aberration. Damian switches to a black and green suit that brings out the sharp of his eyes. He’s so strong, he can lift Bruce clean over his head.

“How long has it been?”

Dick shrugs. The first few grey hairs are starting to show through glossy black. “Ten years.”

Ten years and the flowers are still blooming in the garden and the file is still sitting on the batcave computer and he doesn’t know what happened to that alleyway and there’s blood mixed in with the marble floors of Bank of America and Alfred will be dead soon enough and Jim Gordon won’t be long behind him and Barbara barely looks up from her screens anymore and he can still hear Jason laughing in the dining room and the skyline has morphed into a stranger he doesn’t care to name and nothing feels like it’s the right shape anymore and it hasn’t in a decade and

 

 

 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Dick asks.

The air in Bruce’s lungs catches on something he could have sworn wasn’t ever really there. “I’m just…I miss him. Is that weird?”

“No.”

Bruce laughs.

 

 

 

The clouds have done him the honour of clearing out of town for the evening to expose a spectacular sunset lighting up the bay. At Bruce’s back, the first strands of neon have started to fire up in preparation for the night. If you know where to look you can still find Barbara’s belfry in these streets. You cn find Jason and Tim’s lair, the apartment Duke set himself up with. Over on the mainland, you might find the cottage Alfred’s supposed to live in, though he still spends almost every night at the Manor.

Bruce hasn’t been here in years, long before The Joker was shot in an unnamed alley without ceremony. The thrum of the Ace Chemicals sign, buzzing on and off around it’s ancient bulb, is something of a comfort. 

He remembers a child with a gun that he hadn’t seen until it was all over. The Joker was out in his Sunday best, purple tail coat finely pressed and layered over a lime green bowtie and an acid orange waist coat. He opened his mouth to laugh and roses bloomed at the back of his throat to mark the passing of the bullet. Bruce looked down and he was covered in blood.

He remembers the shock.

The comm line through to the batsuit is silent. The others have their own means to stay in contact with each other and they’ve only told him about a fraction of them. Why would they do things any differently? They’re not kids anymore. Bruce shuts off as many of the suit systems as he can, till it sits like a leaden exo skeleton over his fragile human form. He sucks in air and as his chest expands he can feel the rising waters struggling to break free.

He laughs and he laughs till the sound turns to sobs and he can barely breathe for all the time trying to claw itself back up his throat. The sun dips below the horizon and he can feel tears sticking under the cowl, blurring the lights of the city into something he can no longer appreciate or fully understand.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is borrowed from [Thursday In The Danger Room](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxaNYGeaOjc) by Run The Jewels because that damn chorus....also this song makes me cry so.....
> 
> Apologies for being a massive downer with this one. 
> 
> Comments are love. Come find me on [tumblr](http://jeffersonhairpie.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/chadfuture_).


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